Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola

Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola JOHN MONFASANI 1. A DISCONTINUITY IN HUMANIST LOGIC A RINDOF "APOSTOLICSUCCESSION"has frequently been claimed by historical personages in order to legitimize their authority or ideas. Historians, too, are sometimes given to discovering it, or presuming it, in order to impose some sort of order on the flow of events and opinions. In Renaissance studies, the relationship between Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola is a prime example of such an "apostolic succession" in humanist logic created not by Agricola, but rather by scholars seeking to place either or both men within a historical context. Valla first wrote the Dialectica at the court of Naples in the late i43os. 1In scope and content, his Dialectica had no predecessor as a frontal assault on scholastic logic and philosophy. Rudolph Agricola's De inventione dialectica, on the other hand, was the first humanist work in logic to become a best seller2 It enjoyed a phenomenal press run for about sixty years after 1515, and unquestionably played a major role in the humanist victory over scholasticism in the schools of Northern Europe. s So it is only natural to suppose that when the This paper has benefited from the criticisms of Paul O. Kristeller, Alan Perreiah, Frederick Purnell, Jr., Brian Vickers, and the two anonymous readers for thefoumal, to all of whom I wish to express my gratitude. ' Valla's work went through three recensions, each with a different title, and he referred to it in his other writings by a still greater variety of titles. The name by which it is best known today, Dialecticae disputationes, has the least authority, being the creation of a sixteenth-century editor. In calling it Dialectica, I accept one of Valla's own titles and follow the convention of its modern editor, G. Zippel, in Laurentii Valle Repastinatio dialecticeetphilosophie, 2 vols. (Padua, 1982). For the printings see W. J. Ong, Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 534-58. s Agricola did not finish the work until he had returned to the North in 1479, since it carries the colophon "Finis. Anno (MCCCC)LXXX, III Non. F(e)b." (p. 455 of the Cologne, Io. Gymnicus, 1539 edition lrepr. Nieuwkoop, 1967]; this is the edition I shall cite henceforth). That he began the work in Ferrara towards the end of his stay in Italy is clear from the biography of Ioannes de Pleningen published by F. Pfeiffer, "Rudolf Agricola," Serapeum. Zeitschrift fiir Bibliothekswissenschaft ,Handschnftenkunde und ~ltereLitteratur 1o (1849): Io3: "Ultimis diebus, cum iter [181] 182 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:2 APRIL 199o Dutch humanist Rudolph Agricola came to write his De inventione dialectica while in Ferrara in the late 147os,4 he did so under the influence of Valla's Dialectica.5 Indeed, it has even been asserted that "the three books of Agricola's work consolidate Valla's innovatory emphases into something like textbook form.'6 Such a thesis makes possible a neat linear scheme in the development of humanist rhetoric and logic. But in this instance the notion of an apostolic succession is, I propose to show, a distortion of what actually happened. Direct contact between the Italian humanist and the Dutch scholar is, of course, out of the question. Valla died in t457 and Agricola first took up residence in Italy in 1469.~ Furthermore, Agricola did not cite Valla in the De inventione, and, as far as I have been able to discover, the only work of Valla explicidy mentioned by Agricola, is the De vero bono.a Valla's Dialectica experiac reditum pararet in patriam, rogatu tuo, Theodrice frater [Ioannes de Pleningen's brother], mi amantissime, cepit scribere tres illos libros suos de Iocis dialecticis accuratissime subtilitatis volumen , quod tibi quoque dedicavit." But from the colophon of MS Stuttgart, Wilrttembergische Landesbibliothek, Poet. et Philol. Q. 36, we know Agricola did not finish the work until returning to the North (Pfeiffer, p. 115): "Hii libri tres de inventione dialectica editi sunt anno salutis 1479 [the date XV mer~is Augusti added in red in the margin] per Rhodolphum Agricolam Frisum in oppido Dillingen ad ripas Danubi sub reverendo presule Augustiensi lohanne ex familia comitum Werdenbergensium" (cf...